The Wall Lab and NESCent will be hosting the Mammalian Feeding Ontology Workshop May 21 through May 22, 2012. Paula Mabee, Melissa Haendel, Fuzz Crompton, Anthony Herrel and Sue Herring will be in town to help us develop the anatomy and behavior ontologies for the Feeding Experiments End-user Database (FEED).

Now that FEED v2 is online and available for data upload and download here, we will hold the second Use Case Workshop at the University of Illinois-Chicago Dental School. Professor Ian Grosse (University of Massacusetts, Amherst) will attend the workshop along with FEED project members with the goal of generating new, collaborative studies linking the raw data in FEED with longstanding questions about mammalian craniofacial design that can be address through engineering approaches such as Finite Element Analysis.

This is a collaborative project to generate new variables that measure how the potential for puncture, shear, and crush along a toothrow in functional occlusion changes depending on the relative positions of the upper and lower dentition throughout the tooth-tooth contact period of the power stroke of mastication. It brings together functional morphologists and mathematicians to generate novel computational algorithms to describe tooth movements during the power stroke and quantify relationships among tooth surface structures. The “occlusal energy” variables will be used to evaluate occl

The focus of this research is to document the genomic variation associated with the thick enamel phenotype that distinguishes humans from other extant hominoids. We are comparing sequence similarity in eight genes and their upstream regulatory regions. These genes code for the structural extracellular matrix proteins and the enamel proteases involved in amelogenesis. The thick enamel phenotype of modern humans differs dramatically from the thin enamel of Pan and Gorilla.